Put your phone to work

Client: Dominic Nancekievill, G-Research contact via Beth Gorman <Beth.Gorman@gresearch.co.uk> (later substitute Dominic.Nancekievill@gresearch.co.uk ?)

When people browse social media sites on their phones for hours every day, most of the CPU power goes unused. The old desktop equivalent of this problem was the screensaver, which did little of value until it was co-opted for distributed computing projects such as SETI@home. Your task is to make a platform that can perform useful computation in the background on a large number of mobile phones, while the owners are on social media - or even while they are asleep. It will have to run cross-platform, perhaps using JavaScript, but must also give the appropriate incentives to users - will it drain batteries or incur network charges? If so, what kind of application would customers pay to run on such a platform? Would phone sensors offer any specific value? You need to demonstrate an end-to-end solution including servers, mobile clients and an example application, keeping in mind the security implications if either customers or phone owners try to cheat the system.